Why does James Baldwin matter so much now?

James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and 1964 he produced three bestselling books – two collections of essays and the novel Another Country – as well as a stylish collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon and a Broadway play. In May 1963, Time put him on its cover (Martin Luther King had to wait until the following January). Life called him ‘the monarch of the current literary jungle’.

Well before the end of the decade, the monarch had been toppled. It was America’s time of assassins, and three civil rights leaders were among the fallen: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and, in 1968, King himself. Baldwin caught the ricochet from each bullet. He suffered a breakdown and returned to France, where he had first blossomed as a writer. The chic Provençal village of St-Paul de Vence became his main residence for the rest of his life. By the time of his death in 1987, aged 63, he had retained celebrity status, but his literary standing was much reduced. A visitor to St-Paul in 1984 recalls that Baldwin was having difficulty finding a publisher for what would be his final book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an investigation of the Atlanta child killings that occurred between 1979 and 1980. (The same visitor, invited to read the manuscript, could understand why.)

What has happened to make Baldwin matter so much now? Identity politics is the short answer. His renaissance has its origin in the rise of Queer Studies as an academic discipline in the 1990s, gaining momentum over the past decade from the attention paid to police shootings of young black men in the US.